In Past Show

"Zero" is artist Zhu Jia's work in 2012. Based on a casual tone, the video shows a group of fragmented images with no plot. The actress in different-era attires shuttled in different atmospheres, reflecting a sense of uncertainty. These images are called "described memories" by the artist. In a standard shape pattern, the conceptual images combined with practical reality, thus remolding something anew.

The artist attempts to explore the distance between outside "artificial images" and conventional "visual experience". Lens moved slowly so that the viewer has enough time to gaze details of images, carefully selected everyday objects and fictional landscape, retaining a sensibility. In the conversation "Do I resemble her?", here "her", at one hand, refers to a narrator of the past, at another those that are narrated by the narrator. Described "images" are mixed with imagination of "description" from today's point of view, juxtaposed with today's "scene" in the same time and same space in a surreal and irrational manner. Subjective perspective adrift, "soul" that run through the work, and the complexity and multiplicity in between gradually emerged.

About Zhu Jia 朱加

A seminal figure in contemporary Chinese video art, Zhu Jia trained in oil painting but has worked exclusively in photography and video since the late 1980s. His work, stylistically minimalist but not without a visual punch, interrogates aspects of the quotidian during a time of profound economic, social, and political transformation, touching upon socially taboo topics and the mundane. In works like Forever (1994) and Continuous Landscape (1999-2000), Zhu takes his camera on a dizzying course through Chinese cities, offering new means of making sense of a rapidly changing urban environment. Recent Chinese history, including the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the state’s uncomfortable relationship with contemporary art, also bear heavily on Zhu’s work.